


And the sun will set for you

by sowell



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Curtain Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 02:26:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sowell/pseuds/sowell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Weirdly enough, they live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And the sun will set for you

**Author's Note:**

> Title lifted from "Shadow of the Day" by Linkin Park.

Weirdly enough, they live.  
  
Sam watches his brother go gray at the temples a little too soon, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening into permanence. Dean hits forty without dying again, and Sam takes that as a good sign.  
  
He meets Carol on a job; he and Dean rid her Rhode Island law office of a violent spirit, saving her and opening her eyes to the world of monsters in the process. She’s a young prosecutor, and Sam isn’t used to the rapid-fire way she questions him, all narrowed eyes and clipped, logical lines of thinking: If there are ghosts, then are there vampires? Do you kill them the same way? Is there a monster research library somewhere? How is it possible that the majority of people,  _smart_  people, walk around every day without figuring it out?  
  
Sam shakes his head helplessly and laughs, bowled over by her questions and her clear blue eyes. When Dean looks at him side-eyed and offers to stay an extra day, Sam accepts.  
  
Dean stands in as best man at Sam’s wedding, eyes crinkling in a smile and all the while watching Carol and Sam with wary resignation. As always, Dean’s disapproval needles under his skin. Sam drinks too much at their tiny reception (Carol’s family, all of them), and Carol laughingly tosses the sheets over his face when he makes a drunken swipe at her later that night.  
  


*

Dean and Castiel attempt an intervention of sorts after he proposes to Carol.  
  
“ _Think_ , Sam,” Dean growls. “Do you know what you’re doing?”  
  
“Yes,” Sam says, “Yes. I’m not stupid. I’ve thought about this. She knows what she’s getting into.”  
  
“No,” Dean shouts. “She  _thinks_  she knows, because she’s only seen you on downtime. She’s never seen you really kill something. She’s never seen you…” and Dean stops there, because Sam’s brain can fill in the rest, thank-you-very-much.  
  
She’s never seen you: drink from a demon, have a psychic vision, exorcise evil with your mind, shoot someone in cold blood, have a one-sided conversation with a fallen angel who’s not there. Sam is well aware of all the ways in which he’s fucked up, all things that have gone wrong with him, that are still waiting to go wrong, just out of sight.  
  
But Sam had turned to Carol in bed one morning, over one long weekend free from monsters and blood and stuttered, “You have to know. I- I’ve done things that. I can’t really…” He’d trailed off, frustrated by his own lingering shame.  
  
“It’s okay,” she’d said, hand on his cheek, eyes very close to his. “You can tell me now, or later, or never. It doesn’t matter.”  
  
“It does,” Sam had admitted. “Because it could get you killed.”  
  
She’d blown out a breath and searched his eyes for a moment. “Well,” she said. “You already told me you started the apocalypse. What can be worse than that?”  
  
Sam had buried his face in the pillow and groaned, and she’d draped herself over his back, warm and strong. “I love you,” she’d said. “Even the dark parts.”  
  
Castiel backs Dean, as always. “Your brother is right,” he says. “You’re putting this woman in danger.”  
  
“Sam.” Dean steps toward him, and there’s a note of rough pleading in his voice. “You saw what happened, with Ben and Lisa.” They don’t talk about Ben and Lisa; they’re an open wound for Dean, and the fact that he’s bringing them up now means he’s serious. “I just don’t want,” Dean stops, swallows.  
  
Sam does not say  _I’m not you_  or  _that won’t happen to me_. He knows he could make Dean walk away by saying it, but there are some things you can’t take back.  
  
Instead he puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder, feels the tension there. He looks his brother in the eye, which is something Dean’s never been comfortable with. “I know you’re worried,” he says. “I understand, but….” he shrugs. “I want this. Be happy for me?”  
  
And Dean hangs his head, defeated.  
  


*

  
They all underestimate Carol – she’s fiercer than even Sam realized, and she survives several hauntings and an abduction over the years, all without losing her marbles or filing for divorce.  
  
When she tells him she’s pregnant, Sam lights from head to toe with fear and elation, and it’s so overwhelming that he stumbles out of the house.  
  
He calls Dean out in the middle of the night, and they meet at one of Dad’s safe houses two hundred miles from Sam’s city apartment. They drink until Sam can’t keep quiet anymore, and then every scrap of his thoughts slushes out in some mushed-mouth run of emotion that Dean just shuts up and listens to for once.  
  
“Can you just…say something?” Sam finally says, turning his head toward his brother.  
  
Dean drinks, head bowed. When he finally looks up his eyes are even older than the lines starting to bracket his mouth.  
  
“I don’t like it,” he says. “But I don’t think you have a choice anymore.”  
  
“I could leave,” Sam offers quietly, and Dean looks away, drinks again. Sam keeps going, even though it physically hurts to continue down his current train of thought. “Like you with Ben and Lisa. I could get Cas to…”  
  
“Don’t,” Dean says, sudden and sharp. “You don’t want to go there.”  
  
“Then what?” Sam asks, and he feels like he’s been doing this his whole life. Regardless of college, arguments, demons, and death, he always ends up back here, staring up at Dean and asking  _now what_?  
  
Dean gets up and pours himself another drink. Through the window of the safe house, the moonlight illuminates the dim tangle of branches outside the kitchen. Salt lines the sill, dull and coarse in the darkness. Fuzzy though his senses are, Sam can feel his silver knife holstered against his hip, solid and comforting. He sees the outline of Dean’s pistol against the small of his back, always at the ready. Except for a few short years at Stanford, his whole life has been this – never settled, always half-preparing for the next fight, waiting for the next thing to go bump in the night.  
  
As though reading his mind, Dean says, “So what? You raise your kid in the life, teach it to load a shotgun when it’s six, give it Latin lessons as soon as it starts talking?”  
  
The very thought makes Sam feel all tense and panicky, the way he used to feel walking into another new classroom, another temporary world. Dean must read some of the horror on his face, because he sighs again, cracks open another beer against the counter, and sets it in front of Sam with a thump.  
  
“If you do this,” Dean says, “that’s it. You can’t hunt any more. You know that, right?”  
  
“Yeah,” Sam says, choked.  
  
“And you can’t,” Dean stops, swallows. “You can’t be around me any more. Because I’m a hunter, Sammy. And I can’t stop, even for this. But I won’t put  _your kid_  in danger every time I come to visit.”  
  
Dean’s eyes are a little wet, and Sam feels his own eyes start to burn in response. His stomach bottoms out sickeningly, and that’s how he knows he’s made his decision. He can see, by the look on his brother’s face, that Dean knows it, too.  
  
“Okay,” Dean says, but it cracks in the middle. “Okay.” He smiles a little. He slaps Sam’s stomach, gets up, heads back toward the kitchen window.  
  


*

  
They keep their promises, sort of. Dean is there, right up until Sam’s son is born, and then he isn’t. Sam gets postcards from Seattle, Iowa, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Maine. He wishes Dean had a new partner, a contact,  _someone_  to keep tabs on him, but there’s only Castiel. He wrings a promise out of the angel that he’ll report,  _immediately_ , if Dean’s in trouble, and then he has to endure Castiel’s fathomless stare and cocked head.  
  
“Dean’s usually in trouble,” he says, and Sam rolls his eyes.  
  
“No, I mean real trouble. I mean if he…you know…needs me.”  
  
Castiel opens his mouth again, but Sam puts up a halting hand. “Just, look out for him, okay?”  
  
Castiel looks like he has a million more things to say, but he nods once instead, and then disappears.  
  


*

  
Sam gets a job at a local bookstore. Between his years in college and the occult research he’s done, he can talk literature pretty well, and soon he’s managing the place while the owner is away.  
  
It’s boring, mostly. Once a hunter comes by, looking for resources, and Sam tries not to get too excited about using his dormant knowledge. By the time he’s done pulling books off the shelves and printing out pages of additional resources, the hunter is looking at him through narrowed, suspicious eyes.  
  
“You’re not – ?”  
  
“What?” Sam asks innocently, and silently thanks his father and his brother for thoroughly schooling him in the skill of lying through his teeth.  
  
The hunter shakes his head, then says, “Nevermind.”  
  
Later, Sam hears that three local graves were dug up and the bodies burned to ash. He wonders if Dean knew about the hauntings and purposely stayed away, or if he maybe even sent the hunter in the right direction.  
  
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Sam doesn’t really miss the life, and as the years go by he gets better at ignoring his instincts, glossing over strange stories in the news, reining in his impulse to dig, to search, to uncover. Dean’s experiences with Lisa and Ben are at the forefront of his mind, always – a constant reminder of all the things that could go wrong.  
  


*

  
After a year, Sam stops salting the windows and doors every night. Eighteen months out, he puts his guns away, and by two years he has ditched the knife as well. He keeps the flask of holy water around, because it’s something that can’t accidentally hurt his wife or son, and really, it’s just good sense.  
  
He’s not a great father, he has to admit. He’s always been the one taken care of – he can’t remember a time when Dean didn’t hover over him like some leather-jacketed mother hen – and he does stupid things. He forgets to latch the crib, he wakes the baby with his loud footsteps, and it takes all his considerable concentration to change a diaper.  
  
Carol generally makes up for it, and the few times they fight it’s about his perceived unhappiness. Sam attempts to laugh it off, but she’s not stupid.  
  
“You’re restless,” she accuses. “You miss hunting.”  
  
“I don’t,” he says, and he means it. But…  
  
“I miss my brother,” he admits, and her face softens.  
  
“Why did he disappear, again?” she asks later, curling against him in bed.  
  
Sam blows out a breath. “Because it’s dangerous. For us. You don’t understand the shit that  _follows_  us. It’s better not to have contact with that world at all.”  
  


*

  
When Castiel shows up and says Dean is in trouble, Sam loses his shit for the first time in years. Two days later he will have to apologize to his wife for leaving her and their son stranded at play group without a word. But as Sam is fumbling for his cell, Castiel sharply says, “There isn’t time,” and whisks them to the middle of South Dakota.  
  
The warehouse is covered in symbols that ward off angel interference. Crowley has kept his demons away from them for years, but not all demons are Crowley’s demons and Dean ( _stupid, reckless, moron, idiot_ ) stumbled right into a rebel faction.  
  
Sam has no weapons, no surveillance, and no back-up. He hasn’t hunted since his son was born, and he feels sloppy, anxious. But Castiel nearly shoves him through the door, and then he’s left with no choice but to fight.  
  
There are three of them, and even in his best days Sam would have considered that terrible odds. He’s never had the best combat skills, but languages are second nature to him. The incantation slips from his tongue with ease, the strange syllables forming like it’s been days, not years, since he last chanted them.  
  
He almost gets through the second phrase before a demon is on him, black nightmare eyes in a thin, lined face. He gets thrown, dodges one punch, and then takes another that lays him out flat.  
  
But by the time it happens Dean has struggled a hand out of his restraints, snatching his knife from where the demons laid it on a nearby crate. A second demon lunges at Dean, only to get a knife through the throat. It distracts Sam’s assailant long enough for Sam to finish the incantation, and the remaining two demons spew from their vessels, rocketing up through the ceiling.  
  
Dean blinks at him. “Thanks,” he says. “I never did manage to memorize that.”  
  
His face is very pale, and Sam sees angry gashes running down his forearms and across his chest. A demon’s idea of play.  
  
“Come on,” he mutters, and wraps an arm around Dean’s back to help him limp out the door.  
  
Castiel is waiting impatiently for them, and Dean shakes away Sam’s arm. “You did this?” he seethes, pointing at Sam. “You called him?”  
  
“Dean,” Sam starts. Dean throws a weak punch at Castiel’s face, which Castiel stops with an open palm.  
  
“I thought you’d rather involve him than get yourself killed,” Castiel says, very calmly.  
  
“You promised,” Dean says, wounded.  
  
“I promised you that I wouldn’t call him,” Castiel says. “And I promised him that I would. I had to make a choice. I’m sorry if you think it was the wrong one.”  
  
“Son of a bitch,” Dean growls, and then Sam can’t take it anymore, and he’s grabbing for Dean, pulling them tightly together.  
  
“Ow,” Dean says. “Ow  _ow_. Watch it, Hercules,” and Sam remembers those gashes, leaking blood.  
  
“Yeah,” he says shakily, loosening his grip. “Sorry. I just – “ He tries to disentangle himself, but Dean doesn’t let him, and they stand there hugging until the flutter of Castiel's wings startles them out of it.  
  


*

  
Dean annoys Castiel enough that he refuses to angelport them back to Providence, and so Carol has to wire them money for a plane ticket home.  
  
Sam hangs his head as he trails into his kitchen, cringing at the murder in his wife’s eyes. He knows that look, knows it’s at least half worry, but still – fuck.  
  
She opens her mouth to let him have it, and then Dean steps in behind him, and she freezes. Dean’s eyes dart around the little kitchen, and he looks exactly like he used to when Dad was about to lash into him. Scared, defiant, and more than a little ashamed.  
  
“Hey,” Sam says. “Surprise.”  
  


*

  
Carol lets him have it eventually, but not before she orders pizza for them, puts a beer in Dean’s hand, and makes up the sofa with pillows and a quilt.  
  
Sam leads them up to the nursery. Dean freezes two steps in, and Sam wonders if he’s remembering another nursery and another night. He brings his sleeping son to Dean and arranges him in Dean’s arms, trying not to smile at the panic on Dean’s face.  
  
“We named him John,” Sam says. “You know…after Dad.”  
  
It takes Dean about ten seconds to fall in love with the kid, and Sam realizes with a shivery sort of relief that his brother won’t be disappearing again.  
  


*

  
Dean stays for two weeks, and then he takes off for a hunt in Florida. After that he goes to Nebraska, and then down to Texas. He calls this time, though, and Sam sleeps a little better.  
  
Dean turns forty, and they’re both there to see it. He goes gray at the temples, lined at the eyes, and annoys Sam by still getting laid on a regular basis.  
  
“It’s not just the looks, Sammy,” he says with a broad smile. “It’s the whole package.”  
  
Dean hunts less and less, and then one day he rents out an apartment on the other side of the city.  
  
“What, are you, like, retired now?” Sam asks.  
  
“Yeah right,” Dean snorts. “No one ever retires. Except you.”  
  
Dean shows up for his nephew’s birthdays, gives him wildly in appropriate gifts ( _“A Maxim subscription? Really, Dean?”_ ) and Sam’s pretty sure he takes the kid to a strip club on his sixteenth birthday.  
  


*

  
He tells his son about monsters, but does not teach him to shoot a gun, no matter how much Dean yells at him about it.  
  
He tries to keep God and religion out of it, but after Castiel pops up out of nowhere three or four times, he and Carol sit down and explain that angels exist, and so do God and the devil, and that none of them are really all that trustworthy when it comes down to it.  
  
John gets taken, once, by a nest of vampires trying to draw Sam out. He and Dean slaughter every one of them before they manage to harm a hair on John’s head. Sam is wild with fear, fury, grief. He tries to pick his whole family up and move them off the grid.  
  
Castiel and Dean talk him down off the ledge, arguing that if vampires can find him in Rhode Island then they can find him anywhere, and it’s better to have the home turf advantage.  
  
“You’re not Dad,” Dean says gruffly. “You’re giving the kid a good life – don’t ruin it now.”  
  


*

  
They have failed so many people, Sam thinks. Jess, Dad, Bobby, Ellen, Jo. All the ones they didn’t manage to save. Each other.  
  
Dean’s hair starts to silver, and he gets a little gut, and he  _still_  gets laid. Asshole.  
  
It’s strange when he realizes that the demons have stopped coming for them. “Why?” he asks Castiel.  
  
Castiel, ever young, windblown and somber, says, “They’ve all decided you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”  
  
 _All of them_ , Cas says, and Sam doesn’t really want to think about what that means for him and Dean when they die – really die. Is there a place besides heaven, hell, or purgatory? Is there a place for two humans who have pissed off literally every power that maps the universe?  
  
He tries to bring it up to Dean, and Dean says, “Yeesh, morbid much?”  
  


*

  
Sam sends his son off to college. His hands shake as he and Carol drive away, and he has much, much more sympathy for his own father than he thinks he’s ever had in his life. His own hair is starting to streak gray in the rearview mirror, and he doesn’t think it’s from the years of hunting.  
  
He and Dean share a beer on the hood of the old Impala, Dean conscientiously brushing off the dusty marks left by his boots.  
  
“What the hell,” Dean grumbles. “When did we get old?”  
  
Sam raises his eyebrows. “You’re admitting it? You always said you’d rather drive off a cliff than turn into an old man.”  
  
“Shut up,” Dean grumbles.  
  
They sit for a minute, and then Dean says. “You know, it’s just because I never thought it’d  _happen_. Jesus.”  
  
They drink until the sun turns orange over the horizon, sinking from sight.


End file.
